It's really love, dear, I knew it from the start

[austin_dern]

Well, it's not as though I was likely to disapprove of much in the debut of Conan O'Brien's new show. I was one of the nearly three viewers with him in 1993, you know?

I feel very uneasy about the new theme song. I understand their need to rename the band and that Max Weinberg dropped out following massively invasive open-heart surgery, but that doesn't mean I don't fear the change. At least the closing credit music is correct. I'm a little disappointed the opening credits seems to be basically text-graphic games with the names of who's appearing on the show, since his NBC shows pretty reliably had strong graphic design sensibilities and often animation. Although if he's putting a title on to every episode as the first credits seem to suggest that would be a cool silly little extra.

The set is really beautiful; my first impression is it might be his best of all. It's got the warm wood-panel friendliness of his earliest Late Night sets --- not to mention of Johnny Carson's peak-70s-attractive-sets (there were some attractive things in the 70s), with that strong Moon motif that's always run through Conan's sets. That it's a movable Moon is all the more wonderful and ridiculous.

He hadn't reached the first commercial break before announcing that ``Everyone who uses the Internet's a rabbit''. (This was following him making a bit of fun of people on the Internet, and remembering that people on the Internet are what's kept him going since January.) And he gets the first Troff advert on TV that I've noticed. There was a perfunctory Masturbating Bear appearance, which I hope satisfies the fans of that and lets us carry on to less exhausted comic premises. No appearance of his squirrel, though his squirrel's Twitter feed is carrying on.

Trivia: Congress appropriated $150,000 to the surveys of five potential transcontinental railway paths which it ordered in 1853; another $20,000 was later awarded for the explorations, which Secretary of War Jefferson Davis was to complete and report on within ten months. Source: Empire Express: Building The First Transcontinental Railroad, David Haward Bain.

Currently Reading: Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of A Real Doll, M G Lord. OK, some of the Barbie stuff is just plain weird, and I mean here the doll that grows breasts. I mean ... yeeesh.